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Lizard Brain is a shared blog about Science Fiction and Fantasy from Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

Two things you can look at, and a Star Wars update

01.14.13by Ty Franck

Daniel and I were interviewed for the January issue of Locus. If you don’t subscribe, y0u can still see some excerpts on their website. We discuss our writing process and our love of lurid adventure tales. If you want to know about those two things, you can give it a peek.

Also, you can listen to our voices as we talk about pretty much the same stuff on the Machine Readable podcast from Mile Hi Con.

Ground has been broken on the Star Wars novel. An outline has been approved, and chapters are being typed. Things I’ve learned so far: It is important to know ahead of time how you will handle Chewie talking, the Star Wars universe has instantaneous communication and nearly instantaneous travel but space is STILL big enough to hide things, hyperspace is how you get away from badguys but jumping through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops kid, and Leia is the brains of the operation. If someone has a good idea, it’s Leia. Han is always always always wrong when he makes a plan or predicts the future, but man does he improvise gracefully. More robots. Always more robots.

Will it mesh with Dark Horse’s new Star Wars comic? And what about any other pre-existing material set in that timeframe? Essentially, will you be sticking with existing story continuity, or ignoring it “for the sake of the story”?

Directives from LFL for the past twenty years have been that everything not by Lucas (who reserves the right to use, abuse and disuse what he likes) is supposed to mesh–or at least not contradict. (There’s some wiggle room with stuff published in the pre-Heir to the Empire days, when they weren’t tracking things.) Fortunately, they’ve got people in charge of this kind of thing so it’s usually not a problem.

We do indeed have a team to help us with continuity. Which is a good thing, because it’s a huge body of work. Everything we do will be run past Del Rey (who are doing the books) and also Lucas. Certainly we don’t want to break the continuity if we can help it.

I’m curious, before you start writing do you have a pretty well thought out idea of how the plot will go, or do you just have a general idea and work from there? Are there any “surprises” that just come about when writing? I’m working on some space opera stories myself, all set in the same universe, and I’ve always wondered about the early stages of a novel.

Also, a bit of a random question here, but why is Caliban’s War called Caliban’s War?

We do a general outline before we start writing, but it’s pretty skeletal. It gets filled in and fleshed out as we go. Of course, there are always surprises. But, for me personally, I have to know two things before I can put one word on the page: I have to know the ending, and I have to know what the story is about. And by “about”, I mean the themes we’re exploring, not the plot points.

Caliban is a character from The Tempest. He’s a half human monster that different characters in the play attempt to control, to greater or lesser success. The whole “half human monster that someone is trying to control” thing really spoke to us.